Category Archives: Operational Efficiency
Gartner Points to Marketplaces as Key 2012 Trend
Recently, Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012. Amongst the usual suspects of Cloud computing, social user experience, and mobile applications, App Stores and Marketplaces were highlighted for the first time. According to the report:
“Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus.” (more…)
Proactive Customer Service for Transportation Operators
As a long-time practitioner of Complex Event Processing (referred to as “CEP”) technologies, I see the world in a different way – seemingly difficult problems can easily be solved by this technology. Whenever I hear of a business problem needing timely responses to critical events, I think “CEP!” Whenever a customer asks how they can get their business users more involved in operational decisions and influence outcomes, I say “CEP!” And whenever I read an article where the author asserts that companies need to modernize to be more proactive and customer-centric, I think “I need to call that guy and tell him about ‘CEP!’”
Here’s one case: (more…)
Addressing the Big Data Backup Challenge with Database Archiving
In a recent InformationWeek blog, “Big Data A Big Backup Challenge”, George Crump aptly pointed out the problems of backing up big data and outlined some best practices that should be applied to address them, including:
- Identifying which data can be re-derived and therefore doesn’t need to be backed up
- Eliminating redundancy, file de-duplication, and applying data compression
- Using storage tiering and the combination of online disk and tapes to reduce storage cost and optimize performance (more…)
Hadoop Tuesday Update: Hadoop Paves the Way to Data Services
For too long, many enterprises have been attempting to sort through increasingly complex spaghetti architectures with point-to-point data integration. “They get to the point where when they want to introduce a new product or make a change, they have to touch 30 different systems,” says John Akred, data and platforms lead at Accenture Technology Labs. “That has real consequences in the marketplace for enterprises.”
John continued that Hadoop – an open-source software framework that enables applications to run across large arrays of nodes, accessing petabytes’ worth of data – will help organizations manage and scale up to the huge volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data now surging into organizations. I recently had the opportunity to join John, along with Julianna DeLua, Enterprise Solution Evangelist for Big Data from Informatica, for a discussion of Hadoop’s role in the emerging data as a platform paradigm. The session was the second session of the Hadoop Tuesdays Webinar series, sponsored by Informatica and Cloudera. (more…)
Latency Matters, Even For Websites And Rich Internet Applications
In the past, the term latency has been largely ignored in the IT world, with the exception of network engineers and algorithmic trading experts. But today, there is compelling evidence that latency is an important metric for every business that runs a website, or that deploys Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), because even small delays in presenting data show a clear pattern of pushing customers and readers away.
Interesting data, replicated by multiple sources (including Bing, Google, and Amazon) show that slow-loading pages can cause the viewer to lose focus and potentially even click on something else, possibly never to return.
For instance, on search results, a delay of just .5 second chases away up to 20% of the traffic and revenue. As it says at this O’Reilly Radar post, “delays under half a second impact business metrics”.
Hadoop Tuesday Update: ‘Range of Business Solutions Built on Hadoop Continues to Grow’
In enterprises across the globe, from data centers into the executive suites, everyone is asking the same questions: What is Hadoop, and how can it help us with our Big Data challenges?
The groundswell of interest in Hadoop – an open-source software framework that enables applications to run across large arrays of nodes, accessing petabytes’ worth of data – was discussed by James Kobielus, Forrester’s Big Data and Hadoop expert, at the opening session of the Hadoop Tuesday Webinar series, sponsored by Informatica and Cloudera. (Replay available here.) I had the opportunity to join Jim, along with Julianna DeLua, Enterprise Solution Evangelist for Big Data at Informatica, for a discussion of Hadoop’s growth across the business world.
“Hadoop is in heavy evaluation pretty much everywhere, and that’s only a slight exaggeration,” Jim pointed out. “Hadoop is seen widely now as the next generation of big data processing and storage.”
Hadoop is very much the heart of many of Forrester’s customer inquiries now, “both from users and solution providers,” he added. “They want to take this technology, this new approach, and they want to be able to integrate it more tightly in their operations if they’re users. And into their product portfolios if they’re a solution provider.”
Solution providers are also seeing a great deal of inquiries about Hadoop from enterprise customers – not only from the technical ranks, but from the executive suite as well, Julianna added. “There’s tremendous interest, but also market confusion,” she said. “Our customers have invested a tremendous amount of money, and resources into the existing IT infrastructure. The question is, what does Hadoop do – is this a replacement technology, or is this augmenting our technology?” The answer is that Hadoop is paving the way to analytical capabilities previously not available, she continued. “Tasks that used to take weeks come down to days. With an ability to store and analyze huge amounts of data, the era of sampling is coming to the end. For certain applications such as log analysis, even for network and application-level logs, we’re going from a very limited, average-oriented approach into an all-data type of approach.”
Areas where Hadoop is already providing value include CRM, content management, and sentiment analysis. It is gaining traction among “those that are the C-level sponsors who need to be able to analyze petabytes worth of information streaming in all the time,” Jim said. Log analysis is a particularly strong area as well – perhaps one of the “early killer apps for Hadoop,” he added. “CTOs are looking for the ability to process petabytes worth of log data, in real time. They need to do root cause analysis of problems across complex networks.”
Forrester’s latest survey research shows about 37% of companies have Hadoop projects underway within their enterprises. There are new types of applications unfolding every day. “We’re also seeing Hadoop in a broad range of other areas, such as doing content ETL and digital media,” Jim said. “Online publishers need to be able to render content, transform it in real time and deliver downstream to a broad range of consumers. The range of Hadoop applications continues to grow, and the range of business solutions built on Hadoop continues to grow.”
In the second Hadoop Tuesday Webcast (October 11th), John Akred of Accenture will be delving into the architectural aspects of Hadoop, as well as its role in enabling Data as a Platform.
Future guests for Hadoop Tuesdays include Matt Aslett of The 451Group (October 18), David Menninger of Ventana Research (October 25), Omer Trajman of Cloudera (November 15), David Linthicum of Blue Mountain Labs (November 29), Charles Zedlewski of Cloudera and Wei Zheng of Informatica (December 13). Executives from companies that have already implemented Hadoop within their data operations will also be joining us.
Ultra Messaging Efficiency For Better Agility and Scalability
Our first post in this series on Efficiency covered the high-level performance benefits of super-efficient messaging software, whether you measure for latency or throughput, since efficiency is the property of software that provides performance. “Ultra-low latency” is just another term for extremely fast, lean, efficient execution. For more, see the post: Ultra Messaging is Also High-Throughput, High-Availability, Lower-TCO Messaging.
Our next post covered 24×7 availability, reliability and lower TCO from this efficiency. Less hardware and fewer software processes to touch the data in transit between applications provides these benefits. For more, see the post Ultra Messaging: For 24×7 High Availability, Lower TCO, and Robust Reliability.
This post discusses how the same Ultra Messaging efficiency that provides performance, reliability, and lower TCO also provides great agility and near-linear scalability. And with today’s Big Data challenges, especially in the capital markets, efficiency is more prized than ever.
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The Future of Applications (2): Lowering Costs and Complexity
This is my second blog in a series on the subject of “Informatica & Applications”. You can read my previous blog here:
It’s strange how IT has become so complex. When we started out so many years ago computing was the answer to everything. It was going to make us more productive and was going to allow us to spend so much more time with our loved ones. Do you remember that time when people said “we’ll have a paperless office, and we’ll be finished by 5pm.”?
I wish!
Ultra Messaging: For 24×7 High Availability, Lower TCO, and Robust Reliability
Our first post in this series (Ultra Messaging Is Also High-Throughput, High-Availability, Lower-TCO Messaging) covered, from a very high level, the performance benefits of highly-efficient messaging software by stressing that efficiency is the property of software that provides performance, whether you measure a single piece of data for “ultra-low latency”, or a large batch of data for throughput. Either way, ultimately, it’s all about extremely fast, lean, efficient execution. The way you choose to measure that performance is up to you, and depends on your needs.
But extremely fast, lean, efficient execution has other benefits for the customer besides performance. For example, the same Ultra Messaging efficiency that provides very high performance also provides the foundation for many of the key features of enterprise-quality software, such as true 24×7 high availability, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and robust reliability. In the earlier post, we just touched on these topics, but here we will discuss them in a bit more detail.
Keeping Your MDM Initiative Lean
Human behavior studies show that if you are offered a pizza menu with a number of combination offerings as well as “build it yourself” options, you will order more toppings than if presented with a menu that only presents build it yourself. The same thing for medical tests – if a doctor is presented with a pre-filled in menu of recommended clinical tests for specific diseases (and the option to strike out tests that are not needed) they order more tests than if presented with the same order form but with nothing checked in advance. So what is the relevance for Master Data Management (MDM)? (more…)
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